Opinion Blog

Religion and free speech still at odds

The slaying of our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans in that North Africa nation obviously is sickening. As Hillary Clinton said, an act like this cannot be justified.

Of course, she was referring to the murders apparently being precipitated by reaction to the You Tube excerpt of a film depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer and fraud, according to the Associated Press. The reaction reportedly stemmed from the work of Sam Bacile, the California real estate developer who, the AP reports, “identifies himself as an Israeli Jew and who said he produced, directed and wrote the two-hour film, Innocence of Muslims.”

What we have going on — one more time — is the conflict between religion and free speech. The Islamic extremists who ended the lives of America’s representatives in Libya concluded that their religious values trump the right of others to express themselves.

Until we get to the heart of this dilemma between religion and free speech, awful episodes like this will continue occurring. Before I go further here, let me say that plenty of effort has been exerted to work through this tension.

Yesterday, I went to a celebration of pluralism at a Unity Day rally in Dallas, where representatives from various faith traditions spoke about the need to express one’s point of view while respecting that of another. Today, I’m going to a ceremony at Thanksgiving Square in downtown Dallas, where leaders of the three major Abrahamic faiths will discuss Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel, and Quran. As with this gathering, representatives from those faiths, where most of the tension arises, meet regularly in both the U.S. and across the globe to study the claims of their traditions in a spirit of understanding. They don’t pull punches about their differences, but neither do they attack each other.

Still, we have far to go.

The only answer is for Muslims, Jews and Christians especially to keep talking, talking, talking about their differences. Acts of violence, including murders, certainly won’t further understanding.

The hard part is getting people on the extreme edges of those faiths to understand that point. Self-restraint by pastors like Terry Jones, whose burning of the Quran in Florida provoked violence in Afghanistan, would have helped immensely. The same goes for Bacile, whose film enraged the attackers in Libya.

But the same is true for those who felt the offense against them warranted the death of three innocents. The simple expression of a religious offense does not justify violence.

You would think we wouldn’t need this type of conversation, but we still are caught in a clash of values. Until we make even more progress in working through those distinctions, we are at risk of moments like this continuing to break out without warning. Eleven years after 9/11, that remains the reality of our world.

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The Dallas Morning News Editorial Board was the first editorial board in the nation to use a blog to openly discuss hot topics and issues among its members and with readers. Our intent is to pull back the curtain on the daily process of producing the unsigned editorials that reflect the opinion of the newspaper, and to share analysis and opinion on issues of interest to board members and invited guest bloggers.